The floor isn’t laid out for selling. It’s laid out for the people who work there to be comfortable. The good spots, the easy sightlines, the paths of least resistance, those got arranged around the staff’s ease, not around moving a customer through the store toward a sale. I noticed it early and filed it as sloppiness.
The computers in the bullpen get used to price ammo and look up flights to vacation spots. When a sale falls apart, nobody opens it up to see what happened. Somebody offers a version of events soft enough to swallow, everyone nods, spirits stay up, and we move on. The lost sale, which is the best free information a floor ever generates, goes in the ground unexamined.
For a long time I read all of this as a place that had gotten lazy.
What if none of it is failure? What if it’s all working exactly as intended, and the intention just isn’t mine?
I kept scoring the place against growth. Are we getting better, are we solving the problem, are we reading the feedback and adjusting. By that scorecard the floor is a mess. Un-autopsied sales are malpractice. A layout built around staff comfort instead of conversion is leaving money on the ground. The vacation flights on the company clock are theft of attention. Every one of those is a failing grade.
But that’s my scorecard. It measures growth because growth is what I optimize for. I want problems to solve and systems to find and I want the floor to get better every quarter because I got better every quarter. I brought that objective in the door with me and then I graded the whole organization against it and was quietly appalled.
The organization is not optimizing for growth. It’s optimizing for comfort. And by that scorecard, the real one, the one the behavior reveals, the place is a success.
A store arranged for staff ease is a store where the staff are at ease. Working. That is the goal achieved, not the goal missed. A lost sale that gets a palatable explanation instead of an autopsy protects the mood, and the mood is the point, so the soft explanation is the correct tool, not a dodge. The flights and the ammo prices are people comfortable enough at work to plan the parts of life they actually care about. The business throws off enough to fund all of it and stays pleasant to stand in. Measured against comfort, every single thing I’d been filing as failure is the system succeeding.
Nobody is doing anything wrong. That was the part I couldn’t see while I was busy being right. There’s no laziness to diagnose, no decay, no villain who let a good thing rot. It’s a functioning system pointed at a legitimate objective, and the objective is comfort, and comfort is a completely valid thing for a privately held business to want.
It just isn’t what I want. And that turns out to be enough.
An organization can be succeeding completely and still be the wrong place to stand. Success is measured against an objective, and the objective might not be yours.
Why This Is the Harder Version
The easy version of leaving a job is the one where the place is broken and you’re the one who saw it. That story flatters you. You were too good for a sinking operation, you called it, you got out. I wanted that story. It’s why I kept reading comfort as decay for as long as I did. Decay would have meant I was right and they were failing, and leaving would have been vindication.
The true version is worse for the ego and better for the decision. The place isn’t sinking. It’s fine. It will keep being fine after I go, funding vacations, staying pleasant, declining to autopsy anything, for years. I’m not escaping a failure. I’m leaving a success that was never built for what I’m built for, and there’s nobody to blame for that, including me. The mismatch isn’t anyone’s fault. It’s just a fact about two objectives that don’t line up.
That’s a cleaner reason to leave than grievance, and it costs more to admit, because it takes away the story where I’m the hero who saw the rot. There’s no rot. There’s just a game I’m not playing, being played well, by people who are right to play it.
Field Test
Before you decide your workplace is failing, name the objective you’re grading it against. Write it down.
Then ask whether the organization ever agreed to that objective, or whether you brought it in the door and started scoring in secret.
If the place is failing at your goal but succeeding at its own, you haven’t found incompetence. You’ve found a mismatch.
The Hofflebrock 